The Breast That Refuses to Think Becomes the Object That Destroys Thought

Bion opens “Attacks on Linking” with a deceptively clinical thesis: certain borderline and psychotic patients systematically destroy “anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another.” But the paper’s real force lies not in cataloguing these destructions—the stammer that drowns affection in gasping and gurgling, the sleep that dissolves into mindless oozing, the visual hallucination of invisible objects—but in locating their origin in a failed communicative exchange that precedes all symbolic life. The “primitive breast or penis” is named as “the prototype for all the links of which I wish to speak,” but Bion immediately reframes these not as anatomical part-objects but as functions: “not with the breast but with feeding, poisoning, loving, hating.” The breast that cannot receive the infant’s projected terror—that responds with “impatient ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the child’“—does not simply frustrate the infant. It annihilates the infant’s only available method of communication, namely projective identification, and thereby destroys the prototype of all subsequent linking. When this refused projection is reintrojected, it returns not as modified feeling but as a persecutory internal object that henceforth attacks all emotional connection. Bion’s reconstruction of the mother who “could not tolerate experiencing such feelings and reacted either by denying them ingress, or alternatively by becoming a prey to the anxiety which resulted from introjection of the infant’s feelings” is the paper’s most radical clinical move. It establishes that the psychotic’s internal destroyer has an environmental genealogy—not reducible to innate aggression alone, though Bion insists both factors are always present.

Projective Identification Is the Infant’s First Language, and Its Prohibition Is the First Trauma

What distinguishes Bion from Klein on this point is his insistence that projective identification, far from being merely a primitive defense against unbearable anxiety, constitutes the infant’s foundational communicative act. The patient in analysis who “strove to rid himself of fears of death which were felt to be too powerful for his personality to contain” and “split off his fears and put them into me, the idea apparently being that if they were allowed to repose there long enough they would undergo modification by my psyche and could then be safely reintrojected”—this patient is not simply expelling toxicity. He is attempting to think through another mind. Bion’s model presupposes that the infant requires a container (the mother, later the analyst) who can receive, metabolize, and return projections in tolerable form. This is what Bion would later formalize as the container-contained relationship and what, in this paper, he describes as an “understanding mother” who “is able to experience the feeling of dread… and yet retain a balanced outlook.” The prohibition of this communicative link—whether by the mother’s defensive refusal or the infant’s own envious hatred of the mother’s capacity to remain balanced—produces not merely frustration but a catastrophic arrest: “The disturbance of the impulse of curiosity on which all learning depends, and the denial of the mechanism by which it seeks expression, makes normal development impossible.” The patient cannot even formulate “why?”—guilt has split it off—and is left only with “what?”, a question that can never be answered in isolation. Donald Kalsched, drawing heavily on this paper in The Inner World of Trauma, recognizes that Bion’s “attacks on linking” describe precisely the mechanism by which the archetypal self-care system dismembers experience to prevent re-traumatization. Kalsched maps Bion’s formulation onto the dissociative defense: “an attack on the very capacity for experience itself, which means ‘attacking the links’ between affect and image, perception and thought, sensation and knowledge.” The convergence is not accidental. Both Bion and Kalsched describe a psyche that destroys its own architecture in the name of survival.

The Ego-Destructive Superego Is Not Freud’s Conscience but a Meaning-Annihilating Parasite

Bion’s most consequential theoretical move is his description of the internal object that results from failed containment. When the breast is felt as “fundamentally understanding,” the infant’s envy and hate transform it into “an object whose devouring greed has as its aim the introjection of the infant’s projective identifications in order to destroy them.” Once internalized, this object “exercises the function of a severe and ego-destructive superego.” This is not Freud’s guilt-inducing paternal prohibition. It is a structure that actively devours meaning: what Bion elsewhere calls a “greedy vagina-like ‘breast’ that strips of its goodness all that the infant receives or gives leaving only degenerate objects.” The links that survive this predation are “perverse, cruel, and sterile”—logical in appearance but drained of emotional resonance. Andrew Samuels, in Jung and the Post-Jungians, aligns Bion’s theory of thinking with Jungian archetypal structure, noting that Bion’s “proto-thoughts”—sensory data preceding a thinker—function as “preconceptions” analogous to archetypes. This parallel illuminates a startling implication: if the archetype provides the scaffolding for symbolic experience, and Bion’s ego-destructive superego attacks precisely this scaffolding, then what Bion describes is an assault on the archetypal function itself. Kalsched makes this explicit: Bion’s analysis “raises questions about our assumption within analytical psychology of the psyche’s symbol-forming function sui generis,” suggesting that “even this capacity is relative and depends upon unpredictable variables such as the mother’s projection-metabolizing ability.” Jung’s transcendent function—the psyche’s capacity to bridge opposites through symbol—is not guaranteed. It can be destroyed from within.

Why Hatred of Emotion Becomes Hatred of Life Itself

The paper’s final pages achieve a bleak clarity. “In this state of mind emotion is hated,” Bion writes, because emotion links, and linking threatens the fragile equilibrium maintained by psychotic splitting. “It is a short step from hatred of the emotions to hatred of life itself.” This formulation resonates with Hillman’s insistence in The Dream and the Underworld that depth psychology must attend to the psyche’s own underworld logic rather than imposing developmental optimism upon it. Bion does not offer redemption in this paper. He offers a precise phenomenology of how the mind can become its own executioner—not through repression of content but through annihilation of the very capacity to link content to meaning. For any reader encountering depth psychology today, “Attacks on Linking” remains the indispensable text on how psychic life can be destroyed not by what is thought but by the destruction of thinking itself. No other single paper so economically demonstrates that the precondition for all psychological development—symbolic, relational, cognitive—is not insight or interpretation but the prior existence of a mind willing to receive what another mind cannot hold.